I have been in discussions many times with businessmen and advisers about whether firms should concentrate on their productivity or their quality - which has the biggest impact on success. Of course the quick answer is "Both" - they are not mutually exclusive! But I remember listening to my colleague (and former president of WCPS)

We occasionally see reports or thoughts on the productivity of education - but it is a tricky situation to get to grips with ... partly because it is so hard to define outputs - and especially effective outputs.  Does it matter?  Isn't education something we just have to provide? Well, it matters.  Just take a

There are lots of sites and blogs on the web which purport to be about productivity.  Many of these are about what might be termed 'personal productivity' - time management, self-motivation, etc.  This set me thinking. Is there a natural connection between national productivity, organisational productivity and personal productivity? My own view - based solely

I can be as guilty as the next person is hailing specific concepts and practices as being important determinants of higher productivity.  But we should stop searching for the 'secret' - the panacea - and concentrate on the basics. Productivity is about good organisation, good planning, effective design of facilities, systems and processes, effective motivation

A personal 'productivity' tip sometimes referred to as 'Seinfeld's Chain' after Jerry Seinfeld, the US comedian is a useful reminder of the need to 'keep at it'.  The story is that, when he started writing, Seinfeld would mark each day he had spent his planned time actually writing by putting a big red cross through

Employees work - and work hard  - for various reasons. Obviously there are contractual reasons - they take the money and have to 'put in the hours'. But above and beyond what they are contracted to, most employees put in 'discretionary effort' - over and above the minimum, perhaps because they like what they do,

Last week I talked about gamification - and whether it could be used to help improve productivity If you weren't thinking about it then, I hope you are now - Ambient research suggests that game-based learning will grow from $1.5 billion in 2012 to $2.3 billion in 2017.  This is important.  I am regularly int  touch with productivity centres around the globe

We've heard quite a lot about 'gamification' recently - especially in the context of online learning. I read the term many times before I sought to understand it ... so I thought some of you might be in the same boat and would appreciate an executive summary'. If I'm right (after several minutes of research),